europeforvisitors - 4:14 pm on Apr 11, 2003 (gmt 0)

GoogleGuy wrote:

One thing to consider is that our rankings (because of PageRank and the link structure of the web) often lean more toward information sites.

I think that's less true today than it was a few years ago, at least in commercial categories where SEO is a factor and linking patterns are often artificial.

FWIW, I just searched on the term "breast," and the first 10 search results were for medical information sites. But when I searched on the Latin words for male and female genitals, a significant number of the results were for highly commercial topics such as enlargement pumps and adult novelties. This admittedly quick experiment, combined with observations in other categories such as travel, suggests that--because of artificial linking patterns that are encouraged by PageRank--Google has an unintended bias toward e-commerce pages if the topic is one that has serious moneymaking potential.